SOWING THE SEEDS OF PROGRESS IN HAITI

By R. A. Pearson

The recent devastating 8.8 earthquake in Chili has once again refocused the world’s attention on the progress of the rebuilding of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Haiti, as everyone knows, is the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation and will continue to be so for a long period of time. On March 10, Haiti’s President René Préval visited the White House and thanked President Obama and the American people for the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid provided to Haiti since his country’s ruinous earthquake on January 12. While many Americans and people around the world donated money to many private charities during the initial crisis, and the United States and many other governments contributed initial relief efforts to the stricken nation, the question remains, what is the best way to help rebuild the Haitian economy and infrastructure for a truly better future for the people of the country? Perhaps one of the best ways to help the economy and the vast majority of the Haitian people is to improve the agriculture of the country and the infrastructure that supports it.

The agricultural situation in Haiti is perhaps a mirror of the economy itself; it is backward, inefficient, and lacking an adequate infrastructure to sustain prices after the harvest. For the most part it is a subsistence agricultural economy with a family growing crops and animals to provide for themselves on a small plot of land. Here is a major fact: an acre of cultivated land in the Dominican Republic, the nation which shares the eastern part of the island with Haiti, grows five times the amount of food as an acre in Haiti. In the Dominican Republic they have the same basic soil, weather, and other natural factors, but they have better seed, fertilizers, insecticide, and irrigation projects than their neighbors to the west.

The development of a truly diversified food crop system in the countryside in Haiti would help as the population moves back from the cities. The major crop of the country is corn, but Haitians also grow sorghum, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, yams, and red and black beans. In low areas rice is grown. Another important crop is peanuts. The peanut could become an important cash or money crop for Haiti if the country could develop processing plants for major peanut products such as peanut oil, peanut butter, and peanut flour. The peanut is a diverse product and highly nutritious.

The increased development of the agricultural output of Haiti through various improved seeds, fertilizers, insecticides, and irrigation projects has already come to the attention of the world community. In Haiti they plant around the rainy season. If it rains and you are not ready with your soil, your seeds and fertilizers then you miss the planting season and you could lose 60 percent of your food production. While the United States and Brazil promised to send batches of seeds and fertilizers to Haiti through the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a U.N. food agency, it will take a true international effort to rebuild the agricultural economy of Haiti to a point to where it can be a viable part of the nation’s economy.

Before the earthquake agriculture represented 27 percent of Haiti's GDP. A large number of people had left the farms and went to the cities looking for work. Around 60 percent of the food eaten in Haiti is imported, making the nation highly vulnerable to external price shocks and in an automatic trade deficit with its trading partners. One agricultural trade group estimates one dollar invested in agriculture will produce 40 to 60 dollars worth of food in Haiti.

Another major problem in Haitian agriculture is the lack of adequate roads or infrastructure to move crops from farms to market in the cities. Without adequate roads farmers are forced to sell their crops locally at a depressed price rather that in a city for better prices. While the earthquake was a tragedy the rubble has to go somewhere, and the rubble could be pounded down and used to pave miles or rural roads for a better agricultural infrastructure.

However, a real elephant in the room in the Haitian agricultural dilemma is the problem of deforestation. Fewer than 100,000 acres of forest remain in Haiti, a country that was three-quarters tree-covered when European explorers first arrived 500 years ago. Haiti has lost at least 95 percent of its tree cover, making it one of the worst cases of deforestation in the world. Every year, the country’s 9 million and growing inhabitants cut down and burn 30 million trees for wood and charcoal for cooking fires. This harvesting of trees is 20 million more trees than Haiti grows yearly. Seventy-one percent of all fuel consumed in Haiti is wood or charcoal.

The loss of trees and their roots has led to widespread erosion, especially in the mountainous areas of Haiti. Some 36 million tons of valuable topsoil is swept away every year. The deforestation has added to the problems caused by hurricanes and other storms such as floods, mudslides, wind erosion, and the clogging of irrigation ditches and irrigation projects around Haiti. The planting of trees would help with erosion, mudslides, flooding, and provide jobs for Haitians returning to the countryside. Haiti could also continue to plant crop trees such as citrus fruits, breadfruit, almond, and pineapple trees which would combat both the deforestation problem and aid in the diversification of Haitian agriculture.

While the old large commercial farming days of sugar, cotton, and sisal are gone in Haiti, primarily due to a drop in prices and production, agriculture is still Haiti's most important sector with more than 70 percent of its people living off the land. The world needs to invest and keep investing in seed, fertilizers, irrigation projects, roads, and deforestation projects over a long period of time. The entire agricultural infrastructure of Haiti needs to be built up. While the United States will spend hundreds of millions on government buildings in Port-au-Prince (complete with plenty of bells and whistles, miles of computer cables, and ‘earthquake proof’ foundations) the aid to the agricultural base of the nation will soon be forgotten. This is a shame; given seeds, fertilizers and irrigation Haiti, could not only improve its production of the crops it grows now, but since it is in the tropics it could move toward double or triple cropping (growing more than one crop a year). With even more help Haiti could improve its animals and process its own food.

Investing in the Haitian agriculture and agricultural infrastructure would pay big dividends for the world and Haiti. It would help build the Haitian economy from the bottom up. It would put money in circulation in the countryside where 70 percent of its people live and stop the bleeding of Haitian cash from the country for foreign foodstuffs. A good economy in the countryside would give the cities time to rebuild without the pressure of refugees from the farming areas returning and overcrowding the cities looking for work in a year or two. However, the world needs to hurry. Spring is here, and so are the rains, and the summer hurricane season is right around the corner. To really aid Haiti, America and the world must act immediately with real agricultural aid to this distressed and impoverished nation.